Surveying the mammoth ministry of C. H. Spurgeon, D. L. Moody was heard to remark, “It is not Mr. Spurgeon after all; it is God.” Who was this man that the Lord used in such a singular way?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) was born of Huguenot stock, the son and grandson of Independent preachers. Due to stringent economic conditions, at eighteen months, Charles was sent north to live with his grandparents. The grandfather, James, was a staunch congregational Puritan preacher.
At the age of six, little Charles happened into a musty room in the manse. The room exuded the odor of old leather-bound volumes. He had discovered a hidden treasure! Being already able to read, he poured over Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It fascinated him. Actually, he claimed he read it over one hundred times during his life. The Bunyan classic became a pattern for his own spiritual pilgrimage.
At the age of fifteen, Charles was under conviction and desperately seeking salvation. One snowy Sunday in January of 1850, in a primitive Methodist church in Colchester, an illiterate preacher looked at him and said, “Young man, look to Jesus.” Spurgeon said, “I looked and I lived.”
Study of the Scriptures in 1851 led to the conviction that he should be immersed. His mother said, “Ah, Charles! I often prayed the Lord to make you a Christian, but I never asked that you might become a Baptist.” Charles could not resist: “Ah, Mother! the Lord has answered your prayer with His usual bounty, and given you exceeding abundantly above what you asked or thought.”
Spurgeon hit the ground running. He preached his first sermon in a cottage at Teversham, near Cambridge, at the age of sixteen. His gifts were recognized, and the fame of the “boy preacher” spread. Soon he was preaching in chapels, cottages, and in the open air in as many as thirteen stations in the villages surrounding Cambridge.
How to prepare the preacher
Was this stripling teenager qualified to preach? He did not think so, and was sure he needed a seminary education to equip himself. He made an appointment to be interviewed for admittance. After arriving on time, he waited two hours in Mr. McMillan’s home for Dr. Angus of Stepney College who was waiting in another room, neither knowing that the other had already arrived. A negligent servant girl failed to tell the McMillans that anyone had called and had sent Spurgeon into the drawing room to wait for Dr. Angus. Finally the doctor could wait no longer and left for London.
Charles Spurgeon’s ambition for college had been frustrated. As he dragged himself across the Midsummer Common that afternoon wondering about it all, Spurgeon later wrote, “In the midst of the Common I was startled by what seemed a loud voice, but which may have been a singular illusion. Whichever it was, the impression was vivid to an intense degree. I seemed very distinctly to hear the words, ‘Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not!’ Had it not been for those words, in all probability I would never be where and what I now am. I was conscientious in my obedience to the monition and I have never seen cause to regret it.” So by this strange providence, Spurgeon was happily preserved from the stiffling atmosphere of the seminaries. His formal education was scant, and he never had any formal theological training. This fact continues to confound the academic crowd. He abominated the title “Reverend” when applied to men, and refused to accept degrees, either honorary or earned. This does not mean he put a premium on ignorance, for he was a voracious reader and serious Bible student.
Spurgeon’s spirituality demanded disciplined Bible study. He said, “There is a style of majesty about God’s Word. It’s the living and incorruptible seed. It moves, it stirs itself, it lives, it communes with living man as the living Word. You do not need to bring life to the Scriptures. You should draw life from the Scriptures.”
A day of visitation in London
At the age of nineteen, after preaching two years in Waterbeach near Cambridge, Spurgeon was invited to preach to a congregation in Southwark, South London. John Rippon, Benjamin Keach, and John Gill had been his predecessors at this significant church. So the “boy preacher” began his London ministry of nearly four decades. His first message at the New Park Street Church was heard by about eighty people. In six months, two thousand were being crammed into the old building, while a throng was being turned away, unable to get in. The congregation moved to Exeter Hall, then to Surrey Music Hall where he preached to audiences numbering ten thousand people. At twenty-two, he was the most popular preacher of his day. Soon the Metropolitan Tabernacle was constructed and Spurgeon preached to six thousand every Lord’s day. It became the largest evangelical congregation in the world.
Spurgeon was opposed to the use of organ, choir, or soloist, to create a mood. D. L. Moody was awed by the reverence for God that he saw and heard when visiting the congregation. The acappella singing was majestic. On the first day of each week, in his home or at the Tabernacle, Spurgeon celebrated the Lord’s Supper. He testified that the oftener he obeyed the command, “This do in remembrance of Me,” the more he found the Saviour precious to his soul.
Awakening came to the New Park Street simultaneously with his arrival in London. And Spurgeon was a harbinger of the Revival of 1858, which reached all of Britain by 1860 after its inception in America.
Often his success is explained merely on the grounds that he was a great preacher. But oratory alone does not explain the phenomenon. Spurgeon recognized this: “The times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord have at last dawned upon our land. There are signs of aroused activity in increased earnestness. A spirit of prayer is visiting our churches, and in its path is dropping fatness.” But how deep was the revival?
For three years, there were over one thousand people every Sunday turned away from the ten-thousand-seat Surrey Gardens Music Hall, where he preached before the construction of the Metropolitan Tabernacle building. The Tabernacle, seating six thousand people, was opened in 1861. Here he ministered with great power until his death in 1892.
What was his preaching like?
In Spurgeon’s day, it was commonplace for preachers to read, word by word, their sermons from the pulpit. Spurgeon’s style was extemporaneous. He prepared his Sunday morning message on Saturday night and his Sunday evening message on Sunday afternoon.
With joy he drew water from the wells of salvation. In a day when morose preaching was more commonplace than it is today, Spurgeon had a uniquely refreshing manner. He was chided for using puns in the pulpit. He would answer that they would not reprove him if they knew half the funny things he did not say. Again he said, “I would rather have thirty seconds of laughter than thirty minutes of profound sleep.” He became known as “a happy preacher.” Even in dealing with sin, death and hell, he rejoiced in the Gospel of redemption through Christ and the Cross.
Spurgeon preached from the whole Bible. He felt as much at home in one hemisphere as in the other. His own conversion he attributed to a humble man’s sermon from Isaiah 45:22: “Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” In volume after volume, by actual count, at least half of Spurgeon’s sermons came from the Old Testament. He often declared that the text and not the sermon was used to save the sinner. Spurgeon proclaimed the old doctrines. He kept close to such basic Christian truths as the inspiration of the Scriptures, the deity of Christ, the atonement, the resurrection, the return, and the judgment.
Spurgeon was committed to evangelistic preaching. He said, “I now think I am bound never to preach a sermon without preaching to sinners. I think that a minister who can preach a sermon without addressing sinners does not know how to preach.” Near the end of his days in September 1890, he said, “The ordinary sermon should always be evangelistic.” How we need to heed the old preacher! Often today we hear topical messages or “how-to” sermons in which Jesus Christ is not the theme, but is only incidental to the argument. If Christ is not the core of our message, then what we are hearing may be little better than the sermons given in the Kingdom Hall or the Moslem mosque.
One sin he did not want to be guilty of was of being a bore. He varied the messages to cultivate what he called “the surprise power.” His messages had a stunning effect. He ministered in one of the poorer districts of London, though not among the slums, and “the common people heard him gladly.”
He said that a sermon without illustrations would seem like a house without windows. When a student objected that he could not find good ones, Spurgeon replied with a smile: “If you do not wake up, but go through the world asleep, you cannot see illustrations. But if your minds were thoroughly aroused, if you could see nothing but a tallow candle, you might find in it enough illustrations to last you for six months.” Seeing that the hearers were dubious, he prepared and delivered a series of messages later published as “Sermons in Candles.”
His dear wife might object to my saying so, but Spurgeon looked quite homely. But from that odd shape came a voice that could sound like the roar of ocean breakers, or like the cooing of a mother dove. Without seeming loud to those who sat near, he could make himself understood to one who sat in the far corner of the largest amphitheater in London. His deep, rich resonant voice vibrated with a warmth. He did not strain his voice, or scream. He took care of his voice as if he had been an opera singer. Spurgeon felt that the lyrics of the Gospel should sound like the melody of heaven, and not like wailing from the slough of despond.
South London became full of life and motion, beauty and color. He made the unbeliever long to become a Christian, and the child of God eager to know Him better so as to love Him more.
The spell of that voice once appeared at the Crystal Palace. During the erection of the New Tabernacle, Spurgeon preached in that massive building, which could seat 23,000. On a weekday, before the first appearance, he went into that structure and from the platform recited the words from Isaiah 45:22. Up near the roof, far out of Spurgeon’s view, a carpenter heard that voice as from heaven. He laid down his tools and asked the foreman’s permission to go home. There he yielded his heart to the Saviour.
The secret of his strength
J. Wilbur Chapman, the beloved evangelist crossed the Atlantic to learn the secret of Spurgeon’s power. At the end of a Lord’s Day that seemed to Chapman as a repeat of Pentecost, Chapman tried to thank the older man, but Spurgeon responded, “Don’t thank me! Every day and night thousands of men and women here in London pray for the work of the Tabernacle, and for me. All round the world, day after day, hundreds of thousands of God’s people ask for His blessing on me and my sermons. In answer to those prayers, the Lord opens the windows of heaven and pours out so many blessings that there is not room in our hearts and lives to receive them all.”
Spurgeon died at Mentone, France in 1892 at the young age of fifty-seven. He had gone there for his gout, rheumetism and Bright’s disease. Behind his cheerful preaching, there was a backdrop of anguish and suffering. Whitefield said that “before the Lord uses a man mightily, He wounds him mightily.” This surely applied to Spurgeon.
His works follow him
Besides regular pastoral and preaching duties and publishing of weekly sermons from 1855 on, he founded a college, built a circle of Sunday schools and saw two hundred local churches spring from the London congregation, helped form a society for the dissemination of Bibles and tracts called the Colportage Association, and established Stockwell orphanage, with twelve houses, accommodating five hundred children.
There are more of his books in print today, a hundred years after his death, than any English author. His writings reached an enormous circulation. The Sword and the Trowel, his monthly church magazine, published more than two thousand of his messages. Every six months, he issued a volume of Tabernacle Sermons. The Metropolitan Pulpit was a mammoth work (our set measures more than five feet wide on the bookshelf). His other writings include an autobiography (available in two volumes), The Treasury of David (a homiletic commentary on the Psalms), The Saint and His Saviour, Morning by Morning, Evening by Evening, John Ploughman’s Talks, Feathers for Arrows, Salt Cellars, Lectures to My Students, and Commenting and Commentaries.